How I long for an office meeting, a plate of biscuits and some romance

The government is pushing for everyone who can to now “go back to the office” and it’s causing mixed reactions in my little world.

One of my friends who is working from home is dying to get back. She has been driven mad by her furloughed husband who, after running out of DIY jobs, has now taken to decoupage, the art of gluing pieces of coloured paper over things. He has covered the kitchen chairs, coffee table, bedroom door with pictures torn from magazines and is diligently working his way around the rest of their hard surfaces. My friend feels like she’s living in the “Take On Me” video without the bonus of running around it with Morten Harket. She wants the space and sanctuary of her office where she can talk shop with her colleagues and not worry about whether or not her husband has decoupaged the children.

Another friend of mine is severely asthmatic and is dreading the idea of being crushed in someone’s armpit on the tube again and working in her small, open plan office with her mouth-breathing boss.

Some people have already been going to work for some weeks now because they can’t work from home. Plumbers, for example, and others whose jobs depend on them being in a particular location.

There are also people like me, and burlesque dancers, who don’t have an office to go back to, nor can we go back to the way we worked before. We are left considering what implications it will have on us all if people go back to offices and start trouping en masse back onto trains, buses and trams and spending the day coughing and sneezing on each other (it’s been a long while since I’ve been in an office but I imagine these are things people do there).

It’s hard to imagine how a large, open plan office can be opened for business, with people going up and down lifts together and queueing outside Pret for a sandwich, can be regarded as less dangerous than people sitting, socially distanced, in a theatre. But here we are again, with the arts not being seen as important as an estate agency.

My bitterness aside, human beings were not meant to hang out in just small groups. We are a complex species and need to connect with different people all the time.

When lockdown first happened, I thought of all those fledging office romances being snuffed out. How many babies will now not be born because those romances were denied the chance to flourish? The lockdown in general has been the worst thing to happen to sex and romance – for us single people anyway.

I had been so smugly happy about being single in the last year or so, but for me, “single” has never been synonymous with “celibate” so, without wishing to overshare, I’m not quite so smug any more (I am aware that I just completely overshared).

I understand the need to get people back into offices is not just about allowing them to pick up illicit affairs where they had left off. High streets are dying without passing trade of our office workers. Pret has announced its cutting 2,800 jobs.

I have a soft spot for Pret (I’m now flirting with a sandwich chain). I used to work at a little one opposite the Royal Court of Justice in Holborn years ago. It made a fortune feeding everyone who had any business at the courts. Pret, when I worked there, was a great employer. By that I mean they took us to the pub a lot after work. There always seemed to be a party organised. Julian Metcalfe, who started the chain, would come in and join the sandwich-making sometimes. We’d all stop, no matter how busy we were in the kitchen, at 11 o’clock for the 11 o’clock joke, which, looking back, was my first ever gig. A kitchen full of people making super club sandwiches who came from all over the world were a tough crowd.

If you can do stand-up there, you can do it anywhere. And lately, I have. I’ve performed in fields to people sitting in their cars, in pub gardens and on Zoom.

It’s not the same though. My life has lost the endless gallivanting I loved so much. Life was filled with excitement and an endless stream of new and interesting (and attractive) people.

No matter how in love you are with your partner, or how hot the coals you’d walk over for your kids are, work gives us a place where we can express a different part of ourselves. It allows us to connect with people who aren’t family or even necessarily friends, but with whom we have to get along to make whatever it is we do in our jobs, work.

For a good while in lockdown, I loved having all meetings on Zoom, not having to traipse into Soho for an hour’s chat about yet another project which may or may not come to anything. Six months in, I would very much like to be in someone’s office having a meeting that everyone knows is probably a waste of time but, oh, to be talking shop again, in the flesh, with a plate of fancy biscuits in front of me. I have to admit, I am starting to miss it.